Dewdney - The radiant inventory poems

Copyright 1988 Christopher Dewdney All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Dewdney, Christopher, 1951
The radiant inventory Poems.
ISBN 0-7710-2699-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-539-7
I. Title.
PS8557.E846R32 1988 C811.54 C88-095058-7
PR9199.3.D48R32 1988 The Publisher would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for its assistance. McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario M5A 2P9
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Golders Green 1971 A Palaeozoic Geology of London, Ontario 1973 Fovea Centralis 1975 Spring Trances in the Control Emerald Night 1978 Alter Sublime 1980 Spring Trances in the Control Emerald Night / The Cenozoic Asylum 1982 The Cenozoic Asylum 1983 Predators of the Adoration 1983 The Immaculate Perception 1986 Permugenesis 1987 The Radiant Inventory 1988 The world has become a spectacle of absence, a radiant inventory. The sunlight that falls on the margin of the lake nurtures a deficit in its clarity, its violence. These waves are items are a description of themselves in discourse with their changes through time.

The sand is a finite texture of self corruption. Everything interpenetrating, extensile, at once continuous and discrete. This sunlight both sustains and erodes the luminous surface of matter the precise miracle of life. Now that I have been opened I can never be closed again. The reflection of the sun on the waves is a shining path to the horizon a dazzling lucent shuttle of unknowable complexity. A cloud over the sun momentary camera obscura.

And as I move towards resolution the world abandons its detail in a theatre at once dark & light where life is a kind of joyous shade a shadow over the sun a dark radiance.

Suspended on the still surface of the night lake we paddle silently towards the beach. Its mysterious presence a kind of muteness, an assertion equivocal to our liquid passage. On the shore a stand of birch becomes a grove of fossil lightning in the blinding silence of a full summer moon. Our paddles conspire purchase in an invisible plane glistening, imageless. Each stroke leaving two whirlpools, whispering vortices which zipper up a single vocable.

Utterance from the depths of the lake.

THE EVACUATION ZONE Sleep, come unjoined with me. I am radiant darkness, a boundless prison permeated with escape. And what little the night recovers is squandered at dawn. For the heart has contrived a harm borne of utter simplicity. I have passed through the still eye of the storm.

I have seen the full moon in broken pine chiaroscuro on the freshly fallen snow. For the eye of the needle is the still eye of the storm. And when kneeling she wept it was in the abject darkness of total humiliation. This my emissary for the great silence In her misery we know it.

The sweat on his forehead, beaded into the white hair I stroked in I.C.U. while reading his vital signs.

A labour so immense my father was a giant breathing like a beached whale, his heart too big for all of us. His existence honed to a single desperate thread. Intensive care an ozone delirium of catheters & hissing oxygen hallucinatory with panic. Then suddenly in agony, his final crisis clinically illuminated by the oblique November sun a sacrifice tossed jerking down the temple steps away from us. (O yes. And now an image of him, an image of him falling like a silver coin lost through a hole in the ice.

Winking dimly as it sinks into the depths of the lake. The spring ice he fell through up to his armpits as a young man in Kenora. An image of him falling away from us turning over & over, rigid, like a doll, so completely so totally beyond our will to bring him back. Father through all the others eyes by which I have seen you grow stranger each one a little death, I still know you know your will a single curved muscle a fine obsidian blade suspended for an instant above the rapids catching the sun like a fish leaping above the foam & spray before it falls back into the commotion the background radiation of the universe.

There is a word in the shadow of time. It sounds as no surprise here on the infinite brink of our past.

If you listen carefully, fill the instant with ears, you can hear reality echoing slightly as it falls into the relentless funnel of history. Each of us a single moment growing older. Surrogate dreamers in the shadow of thought. Words are the silence at the heart of ideas and the terrible truth we turned crying from the mirror to face was simply this prison of thought.

We undress at the edge of the dark woodlot and slip under the skin of the lake. On the bottom of the pond there is a dusky village the dream of a child sleeping in the back seat of a car.

Tonight even the owls are dreaming on the wing, soundless flickering stains in the dark sanctum of nights night. They break their predatory silence with the eerie spectral address of dream hunters. The terrible beaks and claws of night. All things here writhe, twist somehow as ciphers in the dreams earthen logic. Here at the eve of self where we falter before each others divinity locked into our skin, distant strangely & cruelly numb to the other. Yet now, embracing underwater, our bodies come unlocked and we gush upwards, rising from the dark lake in a storm of music.

And there in the absolute theatre of night we fuse, recover the lost disorder of the stars.

The mountain is a lunar terrain. Not an icon not a smooth symbol but an aggregate of locales. A vertical landscape containing a thousand human domains. Through the blue particulate haze of a September noon Cascade is a ragged orogenetic stupa, an ancient portion of planetary topography. Strata canted up at an impossible angle by prodigious tectonic labour, the continent crumpling at the edge of the ocean.